What
is Enlightenment? magazine, issue 31, has an article
on Karen Armstrong and the supposed ‘Second Axial
Age’. The use of the term ‘Axial Age’ has suffered
confusion, and has degenerated in some accounts into a
conception of an age that produced the great religions.
But that is not what the Axial Age was. Armstrong’s
thinking here needs my eonic effect model! Armstrong notes
in the article that she plans to write a book on the
Second Axial Age. I would caution against that. It can
result in complete confusion.

Her thinking
seems to have shifted slightly on this, first was the idea
of some kind of postmodern resurgence of religion as the
Second Axial Age, then suddenly there was a shift, she
speaks of this Second Axial Age starting in the sixteenth
and seventeenth century. I was left wondering if she had
seen my website! Jaspers himself seems unclear on this,
and never quite proposed a second Axial Age.

I am not
quite sure of the development of Armstrong's thinking
here. Whatever the case, you can't have it both
ways. The sixteenth and seventeenth century show the
passing beyond the so-called Axial religions and the onset
of the secular age in the wake of the sole large-scale
religious transformation of the modern transition, that of
the Protestant Reformation, one of the generators of the
early modern, but soon transcending itself in the
Enlightenment. We think of the early modern as the onset
of our contemporary scientific, secular societies, with
their economic emphasis. This leaves a second Axial Age
stranded. But the core idea has merit. We must simply
remember that the term 'Axial' is a descriptive of
something in antiquity. If we propose it as one in a
series, we may need a new and more general
terminology.

We can see
the problem. The rise of the modern is the only candidate
for some kind of 'second Axial Age', but this isn't the
onset or generation of a new religion. The problem is that
the idea of a Second Axial Age becomes incoherent. This
New Age version of a Second Axial Age is changing the road
signs. What happened? What went wrong here? The problem is
that the idea of the first Axial Age is itself incoherent,
and has suffered a confusion of meaning. It works fine as
a descriptive, not as an analytic term. Meanwhile
mainstream historians are getting restive here, and
are not likely to consider the idea relevant at all, and
that's a pity, because, understood rightly the Axial Age
is a real phenomenon, one of spectacular scope, and what
is more the best and most convincing evidence of evolution
in action. There is the problem with the Axial Age
concept. It has become a way to contextualize the
emergence of the great religions. But that is not what the
phenomenon was, in toto.

The
problem in part begins with Karl Jaspers who invented the
term 'Axial', but gave it a somewhat contradictory
definition. His insights were brilliant, but he couldn't
quite define what it was that he grappling with. Further,
he calls the onset of Christianity the axis of history,
but somehow brings this 'axis' concept to bear also on the
earlier period, 800-200 BCE.

The
confusion of terms forces us to ask the question, what is
the relation of the great religions to this Axial
interval? If Christianity, and Islam initiate outside the
Axial Age, what are we talking about? Even Judaism as we
know it has this problem. We should look at proto-Judaism
as it is contextualized in the interval we call Axial.
Then we see the point. With remarkable timing we see a
state religion turn into a source of latent materials able
to flow outwards into an environment, there, by another
process, to become the raw material for religions to come.
We could not allow ourselves to be confused by the
retroactive teleological myths constructed around this
process.

Furthermore,
it seems as if monotheism is born in the Axial period, at
least this much seems right. In fact, that's wrong too.
Monotheism was already in existence prior to the Axial
Age. So now we are confused. We need the eonic model I
have created to easily solve this seeming paradox. But the
gist can be more easily seen in the Indian case. There we
see that while the traditions of yoga, for instance, are
almost primordial in their antiquity, they become
amplified in the Axial Age. Renewed, restarted. One
manifestation of this is Buddhism, which is really a
streamlined version of what was already there before. But
for the first time the stream of Indian spiritual
consciousness coalesces into a world religion that begins
to exteriorize. Now we have the clue to Occidental
monotheism. Monotheism predates the Axial Age, in several
inchoate versions, more or less, but coalesces into a
concentrated exteriorizing form that isn't at first even a
religion at all, but the state history of a minor Middle
Eastern kingdom with a state religion. That period is the
only one in the Axial interval. Is not the Old Testament a
strange book? Actually, it is transparently beautiful in
its record of ad hoc incidents that simply record the
Axial interval, and annex a lot of earlier material from
before the Axial interval. Sorry, but Abraham, if he
existed, and Moses, if he existed, aren't in the Axial
interval.

Thus
we see nothing of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam until
later. But we do see the gestation of these, keeping in
mind that there is no simple teleology between the source
point, and the results. Note the ambiguity of dates
surrounding Zoroaster. He may or may not be part of the
Axial Age. It seems probable he predates it. But we can
see the gestation of monotheism very clearly in this other
case, as an Indo-European mythology starts to monotheize.
But it is in the Axial period that the latent indications
of all this, Indo-European, Semitic, begin to formalize
and generate a new disposition toward religion.

I
am sorry, but this changes the picture completely. The
religions that came later have no intrinsic Axial anything
about them, save that they do proceed as direct
descendants from the emergent material appearing in the
complex history of Israel, with suspicious strains of
Zoroastrianism more than probably mixed in during the
Exile. At first this makes no sense. The problem is the
way we see it, as later history has defined it. Jump to
another Axial instance. In every case, the broad outlines
of the process are clear. Suddenly an isomorphic process
is transparently visible in the case of India. Much of
Buddhism is really recycled yoga. Buddhism is actually
quite late. An slightly earlier period, core Axial, shows
a virtually seed bed of spiritual movements, philosophies,
and sages. What is more the resemblance to Greece, in
essence, is remarkable, and synchronous.

Now
let us note that the same can be said of China, but that
the result remains closer to philosophy than to religion.
Then we note the resemblance of China to Greece, and
finally we have the whole set of clues. The Axial Age
tokens something far more general and abstract than
religion. The question of religion is secondary to a
process that is far broader in its effect. How broad? If
we look at Axial Greece we see, among other things, the
first scientific revolution among the Ionians. So our
Axial Age is the source of science too! The same could be
said of democracy, as it appears in the brief climax to
the Greek Archaic period, which is really the most
remarkable case of the whole spectrum of Axial phenomena.
You see, the terms 'sacred' and 'secular' are merely our
own lenses for something that is unified yet strangely
abstract, on its own terms.

The
problem, then, is to equate the Axial Age with some
spiritual transcendentalism. That approach misses the
point. We need finer grained tools to understand this
stupendous moment.

We
should start over. What is it that grips us as we detect
the Axial phenomenon? Synchronous emergentism. We see a
host parallel independent cultural innovations and
breakthroughs across Eurasia in a very compressed
timeframe. We see the effect in China, in India, in the
Middle East, in Greece and marginally in Rome. That
indicates that these may be the tips of the iceberg, since
we can see that the phenomenon is evenly distributed
across Eurasia. This is what intrigues us, this enigma of
a global something that seems to multitask over a whole
continent. We have been so inured to spiritual mythologies
that are no longer believed that once we strip the data of
these metaphysical trappings, we find to our surprise
something more remarkable than what we had before.

What
is the meaning of this sudden tiding wave of emergence? As
we reflect on it we begin to sense that it is not actually
unique. It is true that this period represents a great
advance. But it could hardly be unique. Then we get a
suspicion about the answer. The effect is one of something
in a series. And we stand back to examine world history,
and suddenly we see it. If we backtrack 2400 years we come
to the birth of civilization, and forwards we come to the
rise of the modern. Now we have it, it is a phenomenon in
a series. The problem is that the character of each period
is different, at least at first. After careful study we do
find the common denominator, but it is not a question of
religious formations.

What
is the common denominator? There are many approaches to
that question, but just to suggest one simple idea, think
of fertilizer in a garden. We tend to see the flowers, not
the general process of growth. We wonder why the roses
shows spurts of growth, why the daisies are large in size.
But once we know that the explanation is fertilizer, the
separate independent developments of the plants in tandem
ceases to be a puzzle.

There
is a great deal more to be said here. But the basic issue
is to consider that positing a second Axial Age tends to
break the original concept. We must find a more general
formulation. It is not actually hard to see how the modern
world in its secularism could be the real 'second Axial
Age'. In fact, as noted, the Axial phase of the ancient
Greeks was the first birth of secularism, almost, and this
was in the Axial interval! Except that, this still isn't
quite right, because Axial Greece was also a religious
flowering. How so? Look closely, and you will see that the
Greek polis was in part of religious phenomenon, a last
great flowering of polytheism. Such a statement could lead
to misunderstanding, unless one examines carefully the
nature of the phenomena in question. The Greek case is
complex and changes its character very quickly, and in the
process gives birth to many of the elements that will then
resurface in the modern age.

So
our Axial Age is really a massively complex phenomenon
that crosses all category boundaries. Once we see the
Greek instance in context, we will realize that the birth
of the modern world is really a rebirth of many of the
Axial Age processes that died out in the middle ages,
after the Axial Age. The great religions survived, but
democracy did not, science did not. There rebirth in the
next phase of our series shows the restoration of lost
evolutionary processes.

So
much for a postmodern reaction to modernity as a spiritual
New Age.

These
issues, although not the Axial question, were quite clear
to figures such as Kant and Hegel, who saw that modernity
was a new foundation, but that Reason and religion
required a new creative formulation. Whatever we think of
their actual resolutions of these seeming contradictions,
the general tenor of their thinking can help us to
understand both the limits and future potential of the
Enlightenment.

Too
much New Age thinking is simply orphaned historical
confusion trying spastically to create a future religion,
without seeing the paradox that involves, and the
unlikelihood that history will repeat itself. We have
moved on to a new world, and the restoration of antiquity
in the name of a new Axial Age is not likely to
happen.

All
this barely scratches the surface of a complex question.
But the idea that a second Axial Age can spawn a new
period of spiritual religion is misleading, and likely to
produce contradictory results.

Shortly
following the terrorist attacks in Britain last July, I
sat with world-renowned theologian Karen Armstrong in her
historic London home. As we spoke about the spiritual
challenges of our time and why it behooves us to learn
from religious history, police sirens blared in the
background, a reminder of the violent and unstable
conditions we face as a human species at the outset of the
third millennium.

Driven
from a young age by a thirst for the spiritual life,
Armstrong entered a convent at seventeen and left seven
years later, disillusioned by the traditional structures
and mores that, despite her passion for the divine, simply
could not bring her spiritual yearning to fruition. In the
nearly four decades since then, she has turned that
passion into a prolific investigation into the essence and
evolution of the great traditions. Her best- selling book,
A History of God, now published in more than thirty
languages, is a compelling retrospective of religious
history. In it, she provocatively and exhaustively
illustrates how humans have had to redefine the sacred at
critical historical junctures in order to meet new
spiritual needs created by changing cultural conditions
and large-scale crises.

As we spoke
together in an atmosphere permeated by disquiet and
uncertainty, Armstrong pointed me back to the dawn of the
great religious traditions and simultaneously brought my
attention to the present-a time when once again, she
believes, we will need to redefine the notion of the
sacred so it can become relevant and enter our lives anew.

WHAT IS
ENLIGHTENMENT: In your book A History of God, you
take us through the emergence of the world's religious
traditions, which occurred during what is known as the
Axial Age-a period you feel is particularly relevant to
our own time. To begin with, why is this historic era
called the Axial Age?

KAREN
ARMSTRONG: The period 800-200 BCE has been termed the
Axial Age because it proved pivotal to humanity.

Society had
grown much more aggressive. Iron had been discovered, and
this was the beginning of the Iron Age. Better weapons had
been invented, and while those weapons look puny compared
to what we're dealing with now, it was still a shock. The
first Axial Age also occurred at a time when individualism
was just beginning. As a result of urbanization and a new
market economy, people were no longer living on lonely
hilltops but in a thriving, aggressive, commercial
economy. Power was shifting from king and priest, palace
and temple to the marketplace. Inequality and exploitation
became more apparent as the pace of change accelerated in
the cities and people began to realize that their own
behavior could affect the fate of future generations.

So the Axial
Age marks the beginning of humanity as we now know it.
During this period, men and women became conscious of
their existence, their own nature, and their limitations
in an unprecedented way. In the Axial Age countries, a few
men sensed fresh possibilities and broke away from the old
traditions. People who participated in this great
transformation were convinced that they were on the brink
of a new era and that nothing would ever be the same. They
sought change in the deepest reaches of their beings,
looked for greater inwardness in their spiritual lives,
and tried to become one with a transcendent reality. After
this pivotal era, it was felt that only by reaching beyond
their limits could human beings become most fully
themselves.

WIE: Can
you further describe the ways in which this 'great transformation
manifested?

ARMSTRONG: Most
significantly, it is the time when all the great world
religions came into being. And in every single case, the
spiritualities that emerged during the Axial Age-Taoism
and Confucianism in China, monotheism in Israel, Hinduism,
Buddhism, and Jainism in India, and Greek rationalism in
Europe-began with a recoil from violence, with looking
into the heart to find the sources of violence in the
human psyche. The conviction that the world was awry was
fundamental to these spiritualities. One of the things
that is very striking is that all the great sages were
living in a time like our own-a time full of fear,
violence, and horror. Their experience of utter impotence
in a cruel world impelled them to seek the highest goals
and an absolute reality in the depths of their beings. For
example, the China of Confucius and Lao-tzu was engaged
for centuries in one war after another. The whole of the
very ancient civilization of China was becoming more
aggressive. And you have that understanding very strongly
in Confucius as he looks out on tbe world and laments
loudly while, at the same time, he tries to rebuild it by
recrafting the old rituals in a way that brings forward
their compassionate and altruistic potential. That
essential dynamic of compassion is summed up in the Golden
Rule, which was first enunciated by Confucius around 500
BCE: "Do not do unto others as you would not have
them do unto you."

On the Indian
subcontinent at this time, there was a major economic and
political turnaround. Suddenly powerful kingdoms and
empires were being created, and they relied on force.
People allover India were equating horror with the new
violence in their society and in the marketplace, where
merchants were preying aggressively upon one another. Many
of their philosophies developed a doctrine of nonviolence
as a way to counter violence by refusing any form of it
whatsoever.

The fifth
century was terrifying in Greece as well. While it was a
time of great artistic creativity, it was also a time of
huge violence. The Greeks were, in many respects, a
terrible people, and yet every year in Athens they would
stage the political events of that year in their great
tragedies. These were written as ways of looking at the
tragic implications of what was going on in their midst,
of calling everything into question and really plumbing
the human experience of suffering. So violence and
suffering seem to be a sine qua non of a spiritual quantum
leap forward.

WIE: Why
do you believe it's so important for us to reflect upon
the traditional religions and the age in which they
emerged?

ARMSTRONG: Today
we are amid a second Axial Age and are undergoing a period
of transition similar to that of the first Axial Age. Its
roots lie in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of
the modern era, when the people of Western Europe began to
evolve a different type of society. Since that time,
Western civilization has transformed the world. The
economic changes of the last four hundred years have been
accompanied by immense social, political, and intellectual
revolutions, with the development of an entirely different
scientific and rational concept of the nature of truth.
But despite the cult of rationality, modern history has
been punctuated by witchhunts and world wars which have
been explosions of unreason.

So, I feel
that we are-all of us-at one of those junctions in history
when we are holding ourselves, our past, our future, and
our integrity in the palms of our own hands. This is a
moment when, if we allow that integrity to fallout, we
might never recover it in the same way. Once again, a
radical change has become necessary.

WIE: How
do you see us responding to our own pivotal moment in
history?

ARMSTRONG: All
over the world, people are struggling with these new
conditions and have been forced to reassess their
religious traditions, which were designed for a very
different type of society. They are finding that the old
forms of faith no longer work for them; they cannot
provide the enlightenment -
and
consolation that human beings seem to need. As a result,
men and women are trying to find new ways of being
religious. Like the reformers and prophets of the first
Axial Age, they are attempting to build upon the insights
of the past in a way that will take human beings forward
into the new world they have created for themselves.

We have, from
the very beginning of our existence as a species, created
works of art and created religions to give us the sense
that, against all the aggressive and spirited evidence to
the contrary, life really does have some ultimate meaning,
value, and sacredness. And the notion of the sacred has a
history, since it has always meant something slightly
different to different groups of people at various points
in time. If we look at our three major monotheistic
religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective
"God"; each generation has to create the image
of God that works for them. When one conception of God has
ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been discarded
and replaced by a new theology. Had the notion of God not
had this flexibility, it would not have survived.

In that
context, atheism takes on a different meaning. Atheism is
often a transitional state: Jews, Christians, and Muslims
were all called atheists by their pagan contemporaries
because they had adopted a revolutionary notion of
divinity and transcendence. The people who have been
dubbed atheists over the years have always denied a particular
conception of the divine. But is the God who is
rejected by atheists today the God of the patriarchs, the
God of the prophets, the God of the philosophers, the God
of the mystics, or the God of the eighteenth-century
deists? All these deities have been venerated, but they
are very different from one another. Perhaps modem atheism
is a similar denial of a God that is no longer adequate

to the
problems of our time.

WiE: So,
we are again at a point when
religion and the notion of

God, or the
sacred, may need to be redefined.

ARMSTRONG: Religion
is highly pragmatic, despite its otherworldliness. It
should not only transform us, but it should also transform the world. Religion should
make a difference. And as soon as it ceases to be
effective, it will be changed. So we should be working now
to make our religion and our faith effective in this lost,
suffering, and terrifying world. But' first, before we can
make a proper difference, we must transform ourselves. There's a very good
verse in the Qur'an where God
says, "Therein God will not change the state of the
people unless they change the state of their own
selves." And that what we must do now.

WIE: In
what way do you see this occurring?

ARMSTRONG: At
this moment in history, I believe that we need a new
spiritual revolution. We need a new faith. Now, you can
say, ' "Look, give us a break. This is hardly the
time to start a new spiritual revolution. At this
juncture, we've got war. We've got the prospect of
terrorism. The economy is bad. Let's have a bit of peace
and quiet so that we can go up a mountain, collect
ourselves, and then begin this spiritual effort." But
suffering, fear, violence, and despair are the prime
conditions for such a renewal.

I think the
sages and prophets of the first Axial Age knew very well
about our destructive potentials. What was happening in
their own society was a tremendous shock to them. They had
to look into their own hearts, discover what gave them
pain, and then rigorously refrain from inflicting this
suffering upon other people. In order to counter
aggression, they taught their followers to cultivate the
habit of sympathy for all living things. They discovered
that greed and selfishness were the cause of our personal
misery and that egotism imprisoned us in an inferior
version of ourselves and impeded our enlightenment. Our
present Axial Age is characterized by globalization. We
live in one world, and we have to learn to live with
difference, at home and abroad. We have to see that we
have very big brains and very puny bodies, and because of
our big brains, we've been able to create a technology
that compensates for our small size. But we don't seem to
have the ability to keep our aggression in check.
Unfortunately, as our technological expertise advances,
our spiritual wisdom isn't growing up alongside it. Yet
that's what we need now in this world that, as we're
speaking, is falling apart. We've seen the bombs here in
London, on 9/II, in Auschwitz, in Bosnia. We have lost all
sense of the sacredness of human life. And that has to be
cultivated.

We can't think
"God" without thinking "human" now. We
can't think "human" without thinking
"God." Because the sacred is not just something
tacked on to our natural existence. It's no longer
something out there. The sacred must be that to
which we all aspire. It must become, in the best possible
sense, deeply natural to us. It should fulfill our
being so that we can all, as the Greek Orthodox said, be
like Jesus even in this life, if we live right, in this
certain way.

During the
first Axial Age, the great sages worked at
this. Everyone
was prepared to be creative and spend as much time on this
as people spend today on discovering a new computer. And
that requires discipline. But we've lost the sense that
spirituality is hard work. It is often turned into a
commodity to make us feel good. But it isn't just
wandering lonely as a cloud and hoping you'll see a clump
of daffodils to enthuse about, I believe the Dalai Lama
was reduced to tears when an American audience asked him
how they could get instant enlightenment. He hadn't
realized things were that bad. So we have to make a
constant effort of imagination, which is the great
religious faculty. As Sartre says, "The imagination
is the ability to see what is not present, what is
hidden." We must exercise this faculty fully, whereby
we apprehend, in a new way, the inscrutable and ever-elusive
divine. .

Karen
Armstrong haswritten several books on religion and, culture,
including the best-selling A History of God and The
Battle for God, as
well as lslam: A Short History and Muhammad: A Biography
of the Prophet.. She is currently working on a new
book on the Axial Age. Armstrong teaches at Leo
Baeck College' for the Study of Judaism in London.